A recent requirement from all of the disk drive manufacturers is that the preamplifier write driver must now be symmetric. This means that the common-mode output voltage of the write driver must stay around ground over a high frequency pattern. This is driven by head reliability as the new generation of magnetoresistive (MR) heads are much more sensitive to accumulation of differential and single-ended voltages, and the primary mechanism for this damage is capacitive coupling from the write driver.
Symmetrical writers have been developed to address this problem. While traditional symmetrical writers do reduce the problem substantially compared to traditional write driver architectures, there are several factors that prevent this problem from being minimized even more to the fullest potential. First, the IC process components within the preamplifier are subject to wide variation. In addition, modeling of the entire system (preamplifier write driver, write head, transmission line from write driver to write head) is very complex and subject to errors, both internal and external to the preamplifier. These IC process variations and modeling errors can cause significant deviation from the performance expected through simulation, resulting in excessive asymmetry and coupling to the MR head.